


Reflections on Love & Other Problems

by rixie_rhee



Series: In the Mood [14]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 11:37:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10570518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rixie_rhee/pseuds/rixie_rhee
Summary: When Rissa’s breathing is deep and regular and any residual tension is gone, Nix slips out of bed and pads down the stairs. He doesn’t need the lights, he’s made this particular journey countless times. He takes a tumbler from the cupboard, ice from the freezer, whiskey from the wet bar. He likes this, too. It’s a familiar routine, the sound and smell, the taste and the warm bloom in his belly. Nix sits alone in the dark and drinks in front of the empty fireplace.His wife is sleeping peacefully when he stumbles to bed and her body is pliant and warm in his arms. When he wakes in the morning, there is a glass of water and two aspirin tablets on his bedside table. Water is beading on the side of the glass over the red lipstick kiss Rissy put there for him.





	

The thing is that things wind down. Once there aren’t any more distractions, you’re left to deal with the aftermath. Honestly, Nix’s issues were more straightforward, more obvious. He drank until he forgot and then he became cynical and self-deprecating and sullen. And what can you do? He’s also charming and funny, brave, smart. A good man. One doesn’t negate the other.

Rissy’s shit was more insidious. The girl was good at pretending to be fine. You had to be when you were in the middle of it; there wasn’t a choice. But the thing is, she kept on doing it. Nix knew that she wasn’t always cheerful, that she wasn’t always softness and sweetness and light. No one is.

Time went hurdling ahead. Europe burned, Nix read his maps and gathered his intel, Rissy worked at putting broken people back together. And then there was the baby. Coming home. The wedding and their honeymoon, setting up house together. Through all of that, she was a girl in the first flush of love. It only started to fall apart for her once everything was settled. Nix always knew she was hurting, he recognized that she was bleeding from the inside almost since the day they met. She got quiet and distant sometimes, and a fine tremor would go through her. She’s smoke too much and she wouldn’t eat. But then something would happen and someone would need her, so she’s square her shoulders and go on.

Once he was at the plant and she was alone all day, that’s when it started for real. He’d come home and she’d be sitting on the floor, her back pressed to the radiator. Whatever she was looking at was something no one else could see. It only happened if Richie was asleep, though. She could hold her demons off for him. She wasn’t hallucinating either; it was just that her mind’s eye wouldn’t stop seeing things that she’d rather forget.

Nix very nearly figured out one of her other secrets pretty early on. They’d been on their picnic, lounging under a massive English oak, and he could tell Rissy was about to cry. Instead of letting her tears come, she’d reached for him. In a dazzling feat of self-restraint, he’d held her and let her cry instead of fucking her. Later, he realized that sometimes--and it was only _some_ times, she loves him and she is affectionate by nature--she used sex to avoid her feelings.

He wasn’t above using it, either. Not to get her into his bed, again, she loves him and she’s affectionate. Her fingers were always slipping under his collar, inside his sleeves, across his shoulders, or she’d lay a hand on his arm or in his lap. Rissy’d kiss him in passing, just drop one on the top of his head, his cheek, or the nape of his neck. That last one would make him take in a sharp little breath, especially when the kiss was just a feather-light little thing.

No, she was almost always ready to fall into bed--or chair, or desk, or wherever--with him. When she was starting to get edgy, or just bordering on brooding, exhibiting that one particular brand of neediness that Nix could recognize on instinct alone, he could touch her, and kiss her, and he could love her and let her feel that until she trembled with it. Afterwards, she could talk. She’d curl up next to him and talk, not looking at his face, but she’d talk until all the venom was leeched right out of her and replaced with something else. Making love reeled her back in, tempered her somehow, and she could be soft and pliant again. Nix could draw whatever was poisoning her out, he’d make her come and then he’d listen to her talk.

It went beyond that sometimes, though. When she’d lock herself in the bathroom and cry the kind of racking sobs that burn your ribs, or she’s sit in the tub until the water was cold and she was shivering. He would open the door--or jimmy it, if necessary--when she was like that, and he’d just sit there, being close, or run the hot water and wash her, but the way you’d wash yourself. She’d just let him do it.

(Was it really so different from how Rissy would bring him water and aspirin? Or how sometimes she’d bring him his whiskey and sometimes her lips would tighten when he re-filled his glass?)

Neither one of them were the most patient people. There were definitely times when Nix’s head ached in the morning, when he was irritated with everyone and with himself. He would sit in the front room and Rissy would keep Richie and Emma in the back of the house. They’d play, paint pictures, tell stories, whatever. And every so often, Rissy would come through the room, always for some small reason, but always to check on him. But not in an obnoxious way, not cloying or judgmental, either. Or she’d bring in a sandwich and a drink, lemonade or Coke, fresh from the fridge. She would just set the food down beside him and take the plate away later. He would watch the ice melt, watch the condensation bead up on the glass until it made a little puddle on the tray she always used.

He would do the same sort of thing for her when she was too restless to answer the never-ending stream of questions and when her nerves were stretched too tight and thin to be the kind of mother she wanted to be. Richie and Emma never knew how many times Dad took them out for soft-serve ice-cream cones because their mother felt like she was trying to crawl out of her own skin. Nix understood that she needed quiet but she couldn’t stand to be alone, so the trips were always short. He learned how to be both close enough and far enough away at the same time.

And of course, it wasn’t always that way. Sometimes ice-cream was just ice-cream. Nix liked sitting on the picnic table in the cool purple twilight watching Richie and Emma with big drippy cones. The cones were large if they were there for a reason, small if they were there just because or if Rissa was with them.

 Thank God, they were never in too bad a place at the same time. As improbable as it seems, that never happened once. Weight and counterweight, balancing one another. It worked, and even when it didn’t they were crazy about each other and their kids. And that makes the difference.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a Tuesday when Nix comes home on an evening so oppressive it feels airless. Richie and Emma are playing outside; he could hear them as soon as he opened the car door. They both run to him, happy, throwing their arms around his waist and talking over each other, vying for his attention. Their mother is in a lawn chair, her face turned from him and her shoulders are stiff. When he goes to her, to kiss her, her eyes are two dark hollow wells. He does kiss her, just to the side of her mouth, and then he presses his lips to her forehead.

That evening, the two little Nixons spend the night down the street and Lew tends to his wife. He runs her a bath, undresses her, washes her, dries her, and dresses her again. He strips off his undershirt and puts it on her, pulls clean boxers up her legs. Nix scoops her up and carries her down the hall to the big bed. He sets her there tenderly against the pillows and covers her bare legs with a blanket. She reaches for him but he shakes his head and moves out of her grasp.

“I’ll sit with you, _bichette_ , but that’s it.” He says that, but when he sits down beside her, he sits very close so that they’re flush together and her head is against his hip. Rissy’s skin is pale and smooth under his hands and there’s no tension in her arms or calves or in the nape of her neck. Her hair is still silky and unfashionably long, but it’s the way she likes it and he does, too. Nix takes the whole length in his hand and twists it into a rope. He coils it around his wrist. Her small girl’s hands reach for him again, but only for his thigh, and then she pillows her head there, too.

Her eyes aren’t quite doll’s eyes when she looks up at him. She is looking at him and not through him. This is progress.

“Sweetheart, we can’t do this anymore.” He makes the words quiet and gentle.

“I’ll do better, Lew. I will.” Her voice is tiny, contrite; her tears are coursing diamonds. Nix remembers dancing with her in Paris--she was in his underwear then, too--how animated she was, how she’d laughed, and how she twirled in bare feet.

“That’s not what I mean, Clarissa. I understand, I get it.” He swallows. “I need you to tell me what this is, okay? I mean, what it is for you.”

“Lew?”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes there are things I miss about all that. Not anyone being hurt or being scared or hungry, but there was a kind of…exhilaration to it. And now I’m home with babies. I love them, I love them so much, Lew. I do, and I love being their mother. But I miss the closeness, the sense of purpose. God, it was all so urgent and we were all in it together. I feel lost. I even miss the people I didn’t like. How can anyone miss something so…” Her voice trails off.

“Sweetheart, you miss people you loved and who loved you. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“And Lew?”

“What?” she hesitates and he watches her throat work. He’s patient, waiting through her long pause. She needs time. The window is open and the air is marginally cooler now that the sky has changed from azure streaked with pink and yellow to something that resembles Yale blue, if it was soft and velvet. A bird trills in the gathering darkness, Lew traces Rissy’s cheekbone.

“Lew, J-Johnny loved me.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“No, I mean he really loved me. And I feel like I-I should have--I don’t know.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone forever, Rissy.”

“But I think, Lew, that even if he’d lived, even if we’d been together. Him and me, that I would have--I would have wanted you. I would have fallen so hopelessly in love with you. I was shameless with you, and I was never ashamed of it.”

“Rissy, would you leave me?”

She doesn’t answer but shakes her head.

“I don’t think you would have run off with me. You might have wanted to, but you wouldn’t have. You loved him, too.”

“Not enough. Not the way I love you.”

“But you couldn’t love him the way you love me, the same way you can’t love me the way you loved him. We’re different people. That’s alright.”

“And if I hadn’t been there, maybe…your child and Kathy…”

“Clarissa, I didn’t love her and she didn’t love me. Nothing you and I ever did had anything to do with that. If it wasn’t you, there would have been other girls. And my son, that hasn’t anything to do with you, either.”

“When I saw Johnny’s mother, she couldn’t look at me. She used to say I was like a daughter to her. She held our baby, but she wouldn’t look at me. She wanted Richie to be Johnny’s and she wanted me to be his, too.” Her eyes are pleading in the last vestiges of the light. “But I can’t be because I’m yours so much more than I was ever--“

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” he interrupts.

“No. No, of course not.”

“Anything I did was much worse than anything you did. I was married for Christ’s sake. You weren’t. You could say that I took advantage of you. It probably looked that way, at least at first.”

“But that’s not what happened!”

It doesn’t escape Nix that she’s defending him from himself. “You can’t help who you love.”

“You can help what you _do_.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He speaks right into her ear, and then he does touch her. Nix’s hand slides under the undershirt, but only to caress her side. Her ribs are a ladder his fingers climb. “Clarissa Nixon, you didn’t do anything wrong. Not with me or with anyone else. We did what we did to stay sane. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

He couldn’t have stopped himself from falling in love with her any more than she could have stopped herself from loving him. He’d asked her what kind of _candy_ she wanted, and his heart stopped beating in his chest when she answered “you” to his question. He was trying to make her laugh by being comically lewd, and if her accidental confession stopped his heart, the blush that followed made it beat wildly. The first time he kissed her, the first time he touched her, when they’d gone to bed, it was the undoing of him. And if at first he’d kept carrying on, it was only because he was scared. And human.

Nix understood that Rissy let him see what she let very few people see. All the girlishness, the fear, the tremulous hope, and her appealing absurdity were things she kept locked away for the ones she loves best. There are other things in that treasure chest too, far less pretty but no less precious. He wants all of it, so he listens in August of 1949. He listens and asks questions and reassures her until the silences between the words draw out and they’re both nearly drowsing.

When Rissy’s done confessing what she thinks are her sins, she’s quiet for a long time. Her head is still in his lap and her little hand finds its way into his bigger one. He can feel the pulse in her wrist and he brings it to his lips. Nix can feel her hesitant smile even if he can’t see it.

“Better now?”

“Yeah, only--”

“What is it, cute girl?”

“Lewis, will you make love to me now? Please?”

“I think I can manage that.”

So, Nix makes love to his wife. He moves over her, he keeps it slow and sweet and tender. He likes her soft cries and there’s no reason to shush her, they’re alone. After love, he stays inside her as long as he can, and then he stays over her, propped up on his elbows. His arms are like a cage around her, not to keep her in, but to keep anything that might hurt her out. He kisses her good-night and waits for her to fall asleep.

 

* * *

 

 

When Rissa’s breathing is deep and regular and any residual tension is gone, Nix slips out of bed and pads down the stairs. He doesn’t need the lights, he’s made this particular journey countless times. He takes a tumbler from the cupboard, ice from the freezer, whiskey from the wet bar. He likes this, too. It’s a familiar routine, the sound and smell, the taste and the warm bloom in his belly. Nix sits alone in the dark and drinks in front of the empty fireplace.

His wife is sleeping peacefully when he stumbles to bed and her body is pliant and warm in his arms. When he wakes in the morning, there is a glass of water and two aspirin tablets on his bedside table. Water is beading on the side of the glass over the red lipstick kiss Rissy put there for him.


End file.
